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*How Can You Protect Your Networks from These Attacks?*

MITM attacks can really overwhelm you just by hearing its basic concept, but that doesn’t mean they are impossible to avoid. PKI technology can help protect you from some of the types of attacks we discussed above.

S/MIME
Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, or S/MIME for short, encrypts your emails at rest or in transit, ensuring only intended recipients can read them and leaving no spaces for hackers to slip their way in and alter your messages.

Additionally, S/MIME lets you digitally sign your email with a Digital Certificate unique to every person. This ties your virtual identity to your email and gives your recipients the assurance that the email they received actually came from you (as opposed to a hacker who access your mail server). You can see how this could have been helpful in the Europol example discussed earlier. While the hackers had access to the companies’ mail servers, in order to digitally sign the messages, they would have also needed access to employee private keys, which are generally securely stored elsewhere. Standardizing on digitally signing messages and educating recipients to only trust messages from your company that have been signed can help differentiate legitimate emails from those that have been spoofed.

Authentication Certificates
Hackers will never go away, but one thing you can do is make it virtually impossible to penetrate your systems (e.g. Wi-Fi networks, email systems, internal networks) by implementing Certificate-Based Authentication for all employee machines and devices. This means only endpoints with properly configured certificates can access your systems and networks. Certificates are user-friendly (there is no additional hardware to manage or much user training needed) and deployments can be automated to make things simple for IT and make them hackers split their hair, as the cool kids would say.

*How Can You Protect Your Networks from These Attacks?*
Reviewed by Shirley Bloggastron
on
7:32 PM
Rating: 5